Charlotte at one stage began to insist, after already having been questioned more than once, that her mother had visited her at the time of at least two of the three murders. But Rose found her unconvincing. The young woman somehow contrived to look as if she didn’t even believe herself, and Constance, when told by her solicitor what her daughter had said, apparently merely shook her head.
‘She’s trying to protect me,’ she had said tiredly. ‘That’s typical of Charlotte. She’s always been a very loyal girl.’
Rose continued to be unable to sleep at night and during the day she drove herself mercilessly. Three months had passed since she had walked out on Simon, and she was still living in the police section house. She had had neither time nor inclination to make other arrangements. Sometimes she would have dearly liked to go back to her husband, but she didn’t have the energy to cope with him or anyone else at the moment. The section house provided a welcome limbo. Simon had called a couple of times and once suggested a drink ‘to sort things out a bit’. She had said no, and afterwards wished she had said yes. He didn’t call again. The strain of the break-up and her compulsive preoccupation with the Constance Lange case had become so overwhelming that there were days when Rose feared she was heading for a breakdown.
Certainly she was aware that she was becoming dangerously obsessed with the case. It was on her mind all the time. One night, during a rare couple of hours of fitful sleep, she even dreamt that she was Mrs Pattinson. She woke in a trembling sweat from a numbing nightmare of convolutedly thrashing naked limbs and the flashing of lethal knives.
As she jerked into consciousness she could still see dead faces, and for a few awful seconds she thought that her own sweat was blood.
Still Rose drove herself relentlessly onwards. She did not believe she knew the whole truth and she was determined to find it. Still she harboured the notion that Charlie, perhaps unwittingly, held the key.
Alone one night — and, not for the first time in her dealings with Charlie, totally against procedure — Rose visited him in his dock-side flat. With the Rent Boy Killer allegedly behind bars, and in any case proclaiming that she had never been seeking to harm Charlie in the first place, there was no longer any reason for Charlie to stay away from home. Additionally, although she had not discussed this with Charlie, Rose assumed that his mother must know all too well by now exactly how her beloved son had acquired his beautiful apartment and funded his extravagant lifestyle. The publicity had stopped, of course, with a suspect charged and the sub judice laws in operation, but Charlie had hit so many headlines at one stage they had been almost impossible to avoid.
Charlie looked positively pleased to see her. Rose supposed that his life was not quite as full as it had been. He offered her a glass of wine. She accepted and, yet again, asked him to go over everything he could possibly tell her about Mrs Pattinson.
Charlie sighed. ‘How many times, Rose?’ he asked.
She couldn’t remember at which point he had started calling her by her Christian name. Somewhere along the line. It seemed quite normal now.
‘You’re intruding on private grief here, you know,’ he went on. ‘My life’s in tatters now thanks to that bloody woman. What else can I tell you?’
‘I don’t know.’ Rose’s head was throbbing dully. She had been fighting a nagging headache for several hours. And that wasn’t unusual nowadays. ‘It’s just, and I can’t quite explain it, something isn’t right here, I feel sure of that,’ she went on haltingly. ‘Perhaps there is something we’ve overlooked, you and me — something that will straighten things out. Will you give it a try? One last time.’
Charlie nodded, as if resigned, and started to talk. He told her all of it all over again — the visits to the hotel, the sex games, how convinced he had been at the time that Marty Morris had died instead of him — racking his brains, he said, for anything extra, anything he had previously left out.
After an hour of this, and with the wine bottle almost empty — it had been too sweet for Rose’s taste, really, but she had drunk her share nonetheless — Charlie paused.
Rose could feel him studying her carefully.
‘You look a bit how I feel,’ he remarked bluntly. ‘Bloody dreadful.’
Rose managed a small dry laugh. ‘Thanks a bunch,’ she said.
He smiled back. ‘Sorry. You do look stressed out though, tired too.’
‘I am,’ she said. ‘All of that.’
‘Fancy a spliff?’ he asked.
In spite of herself she burst out laughing. ‘You’ve got a bloody cheek, Charlie Collins,’ she said. ‘I’m a cop, remember.’
He grinned the disarming grin. ‘Yeah, I know. So, fancy a spliff or what? Do you the world of good.’
She gave in, remembering the pleasantly soothing numbness induced a long time ago during her few early experiments of smoking marijuana.
He rolled one swiftly and expertly, lit up and passed it to her.
The first draw felt wonderful. Her head started to spin at once — she didn’t even smoke tobacco, after all — but the dull ache evaporated. The sense of ease and well being, the relaxation after so much tension, was quite overwhelming.
‘Umm,’ she murmured.
She was sitting on one end of the black leather sofa and Charlie was in the armchair opposite. Still looking at her he walked across the room and sat down next to her. He took one of her hands and held it lightly.
‘You know, if you like I could make you forget your troubles altogether for a bit,’ he said casually. ‘I’d do an even better job than a spliff. I’m quite good at making women forget their troubles.’
He flashed a dazzling and wonderfully provocative grin.
Rose could not stop herself thinking how inviting he looked. Young. Fit. Virile. Surprisingly nice to be with.
He took the spliff from her and dragged on it, long and deep. Then he leaned close to her and just brushed his lips against hers. His mouth was warm and he tasted sweetly masculine.
She had not had sex since about three weeks before the big row with Simon — that was nearly four months ago. And, it occurred to her obscurely, that was the longest period of sexual abstinence she had endured since she lost her virginity at the age of seventeen.
Rather to her surprise she found herself greatly tempted to take up Charlie’s invitation. Apart from anything else, she thought him so genuinely likeable. Fleetingly she imagined his arms around her, his hands caressing her, and she couldn’t help wondering what it would be like to sleep with someone with so much experience. With a professional. With a man accustomed to being paid to give pleasure. The idea excited her. Just the way it must have excited Constance, she thought. And it was ultimately that thought which brought her to her sense.
‘I don’t think so, Charlie,’ she said at last, trying to make her voice sound normal.
‘No one need ever know.’ He moved his head slightly and began to kiss her neck just below her left ear, his lips tickling her in a place where he surely could not have known she had always been particularly sensitive.
Her body was responding of its own accord, and she didn’t want it to. She really didn’t. She had forgotten how dope enhances the senses, indeed how thoroughly randy it had always made her when she had tried it before.
‘We’d know,’ she said eventually.
‘Wouldn’t we just,’ he replied, and very gently he bit the soft flesh of her neck.
With a huge effort of will she shook herself free. ‘No, Charlie,’ she said more firmly now.
He grinned again. ‘As you wish,’ he said. ‘I reckon it’s a shame though.’
She could not help smiling back. ‘You’re probably right — but it’s still no.’